Released: Clouds Of Thought Android App

I was thinking to have a mobile app for my website - just because I can! Also, given my history of writing blogs every few weeks and being super lazy to even post it, I did not want to add another layer of work to do mobile releases whenever I post a blog.

Finally I released my Clouds of Thought app on Android - yay! :-)

Challenges

With maintainence being the biggest concern for me, I decided to settle for a webview. I implemented a simple caching into my webview and it worked insanely well. Posting some code snippets for reference:

1. Initializing a WebView in layout file:

   
    <WebView android:id="@+id/siteWebview" android:layout_width="match_parent" android:layout_height="match_parent" tools:layout_editor_absoluteX="191dp" tools:layout_editor_absoluteY="207dp" />
    

2. WebView settings in main activity:

   
        //private WebView siteWebview; // outside the onCreate(..) method
   
        siteWebview = (WebView) findViewById(R.id.siteWebview);
        WebSettings siteWebviewSettings = siteWebview.getSettings();
        siteWebviewSettings.setJavaScriptEnabled(true);
        siteWebviewSettings.setLoadWithOverviewMode(true);
        siteWebviewSettings.setJavaScriptCanOpenWindowsAutomatically(false);
        siteWebviewSettings.setCacheMode(WebSettings.LOAD_DEFAULT);
        siteWebview.loadUrl("https://vishwarajanand.com/blog/");
        siteWebview.setWebViewClient(new WebViewClient());
    

3. Implemented navigation for webview:

   
    if(siteWebview != null && siteWebview.canGoBack()){
        siteWebview.goBack();
    } else{
        super.onBackPressed();
    }
    

I felt it was straightforward to implement and does not have any dependency on new blogs posted. Having a simple website mirror in my app works just fine for my usecases.

I felt it would be super awesome to have following features - which honestly I am still searching and it didn’t seem to be supported out of the box:

1. Deeplinking to popular apps by default
2. Filtering out web URLs which I do not want to allow - currently this app is just like a appified browser

I have hosted the sources on a private GitHub repo because it holds keys to upload the app to playstore too :-P , but for quick mental model check out some screenshots below: